VIDEO: Newborn Lamb With External Beating Heart Saved

A lamb born with its heart beating outside its chest was saved by a vet in Co Offaly earlier this month. 

Cloghan Veterinary Clinic’s Ollie Keane was stunned when the lamb was brought to him on Sunday, March 6. Ollie admitted the condition is so rare that he had no specific training on how to deal with it.  
“The farmer rang me on a Sunday evening telling me he just had a lamb born with something hanging out of his body. So I arranged to meet the farmer and lamb in my surgery in Cloghan,” Ollie recalled.

“I was shocked, to say the least, by what was presented to me. As I held the beating heart in my hand I could see the entire organ was outside of the body. All the blood vessels ran back into the chest through an abnormal hole in the sternum,” he explained. 
Both farmer and Vet were doubtful the lamb could survive, Ollie admitted. “But as the lamb stood there continuously baa’ing at us loudly, we said we would give it a go and let him be lucky,” he said. 
“I had never seen this before and they don’t train you how to fix it in college because it’s so rare, that’s part of the reason I was keen to do this, because if you don’t push yourself to try new things you’ll never find out what’s possible,” said Ollie.

 

 

After surgery under local anesthetic, Ollie cleaned the little lambs heart and placed put it in the lamb's chest cavity. “Apart from a few attempts to run away to find his mammy, the one hour old lamb was a perfect patient. The surgery was completed in about a half hour. He stood up immediately after surgery-still baa’ing at us- so we wrapped him up and sent him back home to be reunited with mammy,” Ollie recalled.  The lamb has returned to a farm outside Banagher and is now doing well, Ollie was happy to report.